In some ways, "Damage Control," the season premiere of Big Love's second season, is all about the aftermath. In many ways, the whole series is all about the aftermath. The foremost expression of this is in the series' central question: How much of yourself do you have to give up to be married to a person? Or, if you're a polygamist, how much of yourself do you have to give up to be married to three people (or share a husband with two others)? "Damage Control" is probably the weakest of the season's first five episodes, but it does most of the heavy lifting required to get the plot away from the revelation of the Henrickson family's polygamous lifestyle at the governor's mansion in last season's finale (the revelation sunk Barb—Jeanne Tripplehorn—in her chance to win the mother of the year award) and on to other business. This mildly irritating plot won't go away completely, but this week's episode deals with it the most fully.

The reason this whole mildly soapy storyline works is because of Tripplehorn, who reasserts her character as the show's center in the premiere. Sure, Bill (the do-gooding Bill Paxton) is first-billed and at the center of most of the show's storylines, but the series often feels like Barb's story—the story of how she became the closest thing there is to an independent woman in a strict religious setting, then lost it all because of her commitment to her beliefs above self. Tripplehorn tells this entire story in throwaway lines and telltale sighs since the show takes place several years after all of these events happened (the show has done nothing so gauche as a flashback episode—yet). "Damage Control" was the most overt acknowledgment yet of all that Barb gave up and just how much Bill depends on the maturity of his relationship with her to get through his day-to-day life.

We first spot Barb frantically churning through the waters of the backyard pool, ostensibly trying to forget all that happened to her at the governor's mansion. Barb returns to the pool again later in the episode after she loses an argument with Bill (who wants her to attend a dinner with the neighbors to begin to piece together who leaked the family secrets), unable and ultimately unwilling to stand up to him and demand her rights. As Barb churns through the water, we watch her move toward the camera from the bottom of the pool, like underwater voyeurs. And, indeed, she seems to reach some moment of painful emotional catharsis while swimming.

Barb leaves Bill and the other wives to go and stay with family friends. In a witty and perfectly constructed scene, she calls to let her youngest daughter know she isn't coming home tonight (while the family watches a movie about a moral, upstanding cowboy in a white hat—surely the sort of man Bill thinks he is), only to find herself trapped in a conversation where Nikki (Chloë Sevigny, showing new, more caring sides of her character in this episode) gives her a purported moral upbraiding and Margie (Ginnifer Goodwin, who gets more mileage out of looking hurt than almost anyone on television) clumsily and childishly tries to manipulate her into returning (by giving the phone to one of the smaller children). One of Big Love's greatest strengths is the way it understands how these three women relate to each other, and how Nikki tries to gain the upper hand over Barb while Margie tries to befriend her, and neither ever quite succeeds, simply because Barb still seems mildly shell-shocked to see them around the house.

The episode ultimately turns on the aftermath of a decision we never get to see Barb make—the decision to step aside and let her husband take multiple wives. Bill is nothing so simple as a villain, but he is often emotionally callous, unaware of how his actions hurt his family members, especially his first wife, who has trouble reconciling who she was before Nikki became the second wife with who she is now. At one point, she lectures her daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried), asking her to not make the same mistakes Barb did, perhaps to not turn over her own freedom so completely to another individual. Sarah asks her if Bill would join Barb if Barb left, and Barb is forced to admit she has no idea.

It's fitting that Barb has this discussion with Sarah, who is going through her own crisis of faith. Sarah has finally realized that she doesn't believe in polygamy, and she's not sure where else to turn. She joins (of all things) an ex-Mormon group at a Baptist church where she discusses her feelings on how she was raised. It's a remarkable scene, especially for Seyfried, who perfectly captures the terror of realizing both that you no longer believe what you always said you did and that everyone thinks you're an idiot for ever believing that in the first place. Sarah vacillates between teary gulps of gratitude at having a place to express herself freely and trying to defend her lifestyle with explanations and snide jokes. She's taking the first steps toward the life her mother would want for her, no matter how tentative those steps may be (and the boy she meets at the support group becomes important in episodes to come).

There were other storylines in "Damage Control", most having to do with the Juniper Creek compound and a crisis of the group's confidence in Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton, who's great but a shade too obviously evil). Federal agents are closing in around Roman, and Bill feels the noose tightening around his neck too (though he gets a promise from the state attorney general's office that as long as he stays clean otherwise, he's OK). In addition, Bill and his co-workers at Home Plus are trying to figure out if his secretary ratted him out. For the most part, all of these storylines feel like padding, though watching Stanton is always interesting. Still, the scene where the secretary races from a dark Hummer and crashes her car, complete with the strains of David Byrne's slightly-too-twee score was a low point for the episode.

But the stuff back at the Henrickson home was so good that it really didn't matter. Barb finally forced herself to join her husband and the neighbors at the Hawaiian-themed dinner (where the neighbor husband banally discusses how the Mormons of Utah could rise up and become independent from the U.S. again if they really wanted to, as if it were just another topic of conversation). Caught in a lie, Barb is forced to lie again to make peace with both the neighbors and Bill. She quells her emotions to make Bill happy and to keep her family safe (as any spouse or parent must do at some time), and the look on Bill's face is one of sweet relief—he can't do this without her.

The final scene, where Bill talks Barb into returning, giving up all of her almost independence with only minor concessions, must frustrate those who watch the show and wish the women would be more assertive. But that would be unrealistic and not in keeping with the characters or their milieu. Bill holds the priesthood for Barb—the only way she knows to see him are as moral center and emotional compass. To question him would be to reorder her cosmos (indeed, many who leave fundamentalist religions and rebuke them are often profoundly depressed for this very reason), and Barb is not to that point yet. For now, we just have to live with the taste we get of her as her own person—Barb, not Barb Henrickson—and wonder, just as much as she does, how she got to this point.

Nathaniel R: You nicely summed up my reservation about this show, which is that there are times when it does seem to want to be other shows -- chiefly "Six Feet Under" (repressed eccentrics chafing under the yoke of mainstream society) and "The Sopranos" or "Deadwood" (rival factions of a shadowy subculture fighting to claim bigger pieces of a finite pie). The quadrangle marriage is the heart of the series and the key to its potential greatness. Frankly, I wouldn't mind them going in more of a domestic soap direction -- focus on the family (so to speak), explore the tension between the polygamists and "straight" culture (the public exposure of the Henricksons'0 lifestyle is the best subplot in the first few episodes that's not directly related to the dynamics of the household itself) and nix everything else.

When you're doing things no series has done before, why waste effort doing other things that have been done many times, and better?

PS -- I concur with Todd and everyone else who's seen more than the debut. The first episode's got a lot of throat clearing, but from then on out it gets better and better.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-06-17 00:29:00

i find this show so fascinating but largely because i grew up Mormon and lived in salt lake for many years and it's great to see what they get right and wrong...

i've seen the first five episodes of the second season and thankfully it gets a lot better past the awkward season 2 debut.

my general feeling on this show is it needs to stop being other shows (the shady mafia like Roman is too 'other shows' for me) and focus on what makes it fascinating: the quadrangle marriage. I wish the show were a little braver in exploring them and less focused on "plot" but it's still good televisionPosted by NATHANIEL R on 2007-06-16 02:44:00

I think you're right about the kind of rushed feel this episode had to it. In that regard, I think that this episode would have been a great finale to Season 1 rather than the premiere of Season 2. That would have left the hiatus for us to ponder whether or not Barb (or any of the wives for that matter) would make an "escape attempt" this season. It also would have allowed the premiere episode to flesh out the themes we're all discussing at a slower, more thoughtful pace.Posted by Anonymous on 2007-06-14 19:10:00

Anon -- I like the show for its lack of moralizing too, but I feel as though part of the "arc" of Tripplehorn and Goodwin's characters will require them to think about if they want to leave this lifestyle at some point in their lives.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2007-06-13 05:51:00

I'm a bit disappointed in the moralizing that has gone on here by nearly everyone - bemoaning that you may never see one of the characters 'escape' is to put your judgement and taste too far into the forefront and hinders appreciation of aesthetic qualities of any show. Polygamy is not something I agree with but why? Because I have thought long and hard and come to this conclusion or because of how I grew up and the way I was taught? The latter. The show is amazing to me in that it attempts to convey the difficulties of a real polygamist life, acknowledging and taking place *within* a culture that despises it without forcing down your throats a morality of right or wrong (yet at least) about the issue. If we watch the show *only* in the mindset that this is obviously wrong and thus its dramatic effect and thrust comes merely from the possibility of 'escape,' I think we do ourselves and the show itself a disservice. If we watch the show through these eyes alone, we're missing out.Posted by Anonymous on 2007-06-13 02:09:00

Tosy -- the rather clinical tone? With the exception of Lost, the other shows you list make an effort to root out the drama of the mundane. Big Love takes an inherently dramatic situation and roots out the mundane in it, then finds the drama in that mundanity.

As Matt said last week in the comments on my T.V. on TV on this -- the setup is so fraught with potential that it would be tough to screw up, and Big Love at its best goes well beyond just not screwing up.

I really think you guys will like the upcoming episodes, particularly three, four and five.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2007-06-12 21:23:00

Most of the shows I like I can sort of define for myself what I like about them. I like the Sopranos because it's mix of tragedy and comedy is tough to beat. I love Lost because of the twists and turns and mystery and scenery and score and ability to move me. I love The Office because in amidst the hysterical comedy are some unexpectedly deep characters. Why do I love Big Love? The acting is very good, but not as good as the acting on The Sopranos or Lost. It's not suspenseful, or exciting. It doesn't really move me. The production values are good (this IS HBO), but don't stand out. And I find the central relatioship between Bill, Barb, Nikki, and Margene to be off-putting and creepy. And yet I DO like the show - very much. Why?Posted by Tosy And Cosh on 2007-06-12 19:12:00

Abbie: I could see that.

And, to me, Nikki really cares about the family (or, at least, the religious beliefs behind it). She just expresses that care rather abrasively. Of course, I have the benefit of having seen other episodes, so I may be projecting what I know onto this first episode.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2007-06-12 18:03:00

I think the show can still draw out the idea of one of the women leaving the family, since it has to be what the majority of the audience wants to happen anyway. Not that the audience gets what they want, but I'm not sure I want to think that I'm going to watch several seasons of this show and never get to see Barb or Margie escape.

So while they rushed a reconciliation in this episode, it makes sense that this will set up such a plot later in the season or in the series.

Nikki... more caring? I just didn't see that at all. But there are very few characters on tv that I want to smack as much as Nikki.Posted by Abbie on 2007-06-12 17:23:00

Spencer -- they get a little bit more into the aftershocks of her actions, and she's definitely looking for a way to define herself outside of the family throughout the first five, but I agree this probably would have been fascinating over three or four episodes (though it certainly wouldn't placate those who say this moves too slowly).

Ed -- I think he's gone for good. On a personal level, Goodwin's my favorite too. But that might just be because she looks like the girls I used to hit on in college.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2007-06-12 16:42:00

I'm in total agreement that the Juniper Creek plotline is seeming a bit tired. I hope the show doesn't hold on to Roman as Bill's villain purely because it feels it needs to - my enjoyment of the show has never been based on that conflict anyway but rather the family dynamics that make the show so interesting.

While I thought the Barb plot line was strong and Tripplehorn's acting typically excellent, I couldn't help feeling that this was a development that could have been explored further, and deeper, in more episodes than one. In fact, with the quick way the episode wrapped, with Barb quite suddenly returning in a fashion I found to be a little too hollywood-esque (what with the dramatic dinner arrival), I thought the show left a missed opportunity here. The prospect of Barb leaving the family and its effects on the remainder is a fascinating one and one deserving of more time than the show gave it.Posted by Spencer on 2007-06-12 15:10:00

I agree about Tripplehorn, but I have to admit that Goodwin is my favorite on the show and the reason I keep tuning in. Since you've seen the first five episodes, is Bruce Dern gone? I didn't notice his name in the opening credits.Posted by Edward Copeland on 2007-06-12 14:18:00